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Running Axon.ivy Designer on KDE Neon (Ubuntu 16.04)

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This blog post was published more than one year ago and might be outdated!
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Stephan Hochdörfer
Stephan Hochdörfer
Head of IT Business Operations

I had a hard time getting the Axon.ivy Designer to run on my KDE Neon desktop. The designer application - basically a custom Eclipse build - starts fine but when I try to launch the browser view, the Eclipse instance crashes. Browsing the Eclipse bugtracker showed that this is a common problem or in other words "practically speaking the embedded browser widget is unusable" on a recent Linux version. It was proposed that installing libwebkitgtk-1.0 would fix the problem, but that did not work for me. Instead installing libwebkitgtk-3.0 and a minor tweak finally fixed the problem for me.

At first I installed libwebkitgtk-3.0:

apt install libwebkitgtk-3.0-0 libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev libwebkitgtk3.0-cil libwebkitgtk3.0-cil-dev

Then I set the SWT_GTK3 environment variable which forces Eclipse to load libwebkitgtk-3.0 instead of the "older" libwebkitgtk-1.0 version:

export SWT_GTK3=1

After launching the Axon.ivy Designer I am now able to invoke the web browser view and finally see Axon.ivy in action.